Posts Tagged ‘oratory’
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”*…
Today we have Substack and social media and blogs. In the old days, we “spoke” in person…
Speaker’s Corner, in Hyde Park in London, is a fabled site of on-going, open public speeches and debate. As Amelia Soth reminds us, that tradition also has a long history in the U.S…
There is nothing in American civic life today like Chicago’s old “Bughouse Square.” From the 1890s to the mid-1960s, it was a hotspot for soapbox speakers: radicals, evangelists, cranks, poets, philosophers, and eccentrics. Anyone with a perspective outside the mainstream gathered there nightly to declaim from their improvised podiums. The ethos, as one newspaper put it, was “free speech and the louder the better.” People actually came to listen, too, in crowds.
Bughouse Square (properly named Washington Square Park) might be the most famous free-speech center, but the practice of soapboxing stretched from sea to shining sea. New York City had its own crew of “peripatetic philosophers.” Hubert Harrison, known as the “Black Socrates,” delivered his critiques of capital right in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Then there was Portia Willis, the “suffrage beauty,” who drew in crowds with her looks and kept them with her wits.
As Mary Anne Trasciatti writes in “Athens or Anarchy? Soapbox Oratory and the Early Twentieth-Century American City,” the soapbox was a particularly democratic mode of public address. Even if you couldn’t get your cause into a meeting hall or a newspaper column, you could still hop on a box, lift your head a few inches above the crowd, and start talking. But that doesn’t mean just anyone could be a successful soapboxer. You had to be a good speaker to keep the crowds listening.
People tried all kinds of tricks to get attention. One soapboxer (wonderfully named Lowlife McCormick) would perform a Houdini-like escape from a straitjacket, which he would then declare to be a metaphor for the bonds of wage labor. Another would catch the crowd’s attention by shouting “I’ve been robbed! I’ve been robbed!” Once he had their ears, he’d finish up with “…by the capitalist system!” A really good soapboxer could draw in so many listeners as to render the streets impassable. One photo shows anarchist Alexander Berkman completely surrounded by a sea of hats.
But the attention soapboxing attracted wasn’t always positive. The 1910s saw a series of vicious “free speech fights” kick off in cities like Spokane, San Diego, and Fresno. Grace L. Miller lays out the history of perhaps the most violent of these struggles in “The I.W.W. Free Speech Fight: San Diego, 1912.” Things started to heat up when a deputy sheriff drove his car into a crowd of people listening to a socialist speaker. One listener reacted by slashing the sheriff’s tire. Within two days, the city passed an ordinance banning street speaking.
In response, the I.W.W. (the Industrial Workers of the World, or the “Wobblies”) urged supporters to ride the rails to San Diego and fight for their right to soapbox:
Come on the cushions; ride up on top;
stick to the brake beams; let nothing stop.
Come in great numbers; this we beseech;
Help San Diego to win free speech.Soapboxers descended on the town en masse. Each would step up on the box, say a word or two, and then get yanked off by the police and carried to jail. There’s even an old Wobbly joke about a speaker who starts his speech with the traditional salutation—“Fellow friends and workers”—and then, when he realizes no one’s coming to arrest him, panics and shouts “Where are the cops?!”
The Wobblies’ goal was to overwhelm the court system with free-speech cases until the city was forced to give up prosecuting soapboxers. Soon the jail was overflowing. But instead of following the legal process, the city discharged the arrestees right into the waiting arms of a vigilante gang, who drove the Wobblies to the county line and viciously beat them with axe handles.
It’s not exactly clear who the vigilantes were, but the gang may have been composed of some of the city’s most prominent citizens. A newspaper editor who was run out of town for his sympathy to the free-speechers wrote of them (as quoted by Miller): “The chamber of commerce and the real estate board are well represented. The press and public utility corporations, as well as members of the Grand Jury are known to belong.”
Yet the vigilantes went too far, and labor organizations called on the state government to intervene. The commissioner sent to investigate declared that the abuses he saw weren’t taking place in Tsarist Russia. At great personal cost, the Wobblies had put the concept of free speech to the test, and won…
When public oratory was a defining feature of civic life: “The Golden Age of the American Soapbox,” from @amelia-soth.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing, to the Parliament of England
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As we speak up, we might ponder another Chicago-related phenomenon, recalling that it was on this date in 1986 that Geraldo Rivera made a “shocking discovery”:
Notorious and “most wanted” gangster, Al Capone, began his life of crime in Chicago in 1919 and had his headquarters set up at the Lexington Hotel until his arrest in 1931.
Years later, renovations were being made at the hotel when a team of workers discovered a shooting-range and series of connected tunnels that led to taverns and brothels making for an easy escape should there be a police raid. Rumors were spread that Capone had a secret vault hidden under the hotel as well.
In 1985, news reporter Geraldo Rivera had been fired from ABC after he criticized the network for canceling his report made about an alleged relationship between John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. It seemed like a good time for Rivera to scoop a new story to repair his reputation.
It was on this day [that] a live, two-hour, syndicated TV special, The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault aired. After lots of backstory, the time finally came to reveal what was in that vault. It turned out to be empty. After the show, Rivera was quoted as saying “Seems like we struck out.”
– source
“A good bookshop is like a genteel black hole that knows how to read”*…
Some good news…
Riding strong gains in the second half of the year, bookstore sales increased 28% in 2021 over 2020, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Sales were $9.03 billion, compared to sales of $6.50 billion in pandemic-ravaged 2020.
The rebound was not quite enough to bring 2021 bookstore sales back to 2019 levels, falling 1% below 2019 sales of $9.13 billion… [but] was higher than the 19.3% increase for the entire retail sector…
Book shops are back: “Bookstore Sales Rose 28% in 2021,” from @PublishersWkly
* Terry Pratchett
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As we browse, we might spare a thought for an author whose works are eminently worth picking up on one’s next bookstore run: social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass (Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey); he died on this date in 1895. Born into slavery, he escaped to become a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings.
He was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens; indeed, some Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great thinker had once been a slave.
Douglass believed in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto “No Union with Slaveholders,” criticized Douglass’s willingness to engage in dialogue with slave owners, he replied: “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver…”*…
These postures and attitudes were meant for 19th-century students to use when practicing speech-giving. Presented as illustrations in Charles W. Sanders’ Sanders’ School Speaker: A Comprehensive Course of Instruction in the Principles of Oratory; With Numerous Exercises for Practice in Declamation, the figures advised students how to use their bodies to heighten the effect of their delivery. Sanders’ 1857 book (viewable via the Internet Archive) is only one of many such elocution primers available for classroom use in the 19th century, when oratory was quite commonly included in curricula.
Sanders’ compendium contains a short section on principles of elocution (how to modulate speech; when to pause) and a section on gesture, illustrated by these images. The bulk of the book is filled with “Exercises in Declamation”: texts that the student could memorize, then use to practice these principles.
Sanders protested in his introduction to the book that true eloquence was not just a matter of silver-tongued trickery: “The prime element in the constitution of the great orator is, and can be, found only in the good man.” To that end, he wrote, he had included only texts that would cultivate “high moral character” in the student speaker. Some of his choices of authors, at the time of the book’s publication the late 1850s, definitively marked the book as Northern: Charles Sumner; Cassius M. Clay; William H. Seward; Lydia Maria Child...
More powerful postures (and larger photos) at the redoubtable Rebecca Onion‘s “How to Captivate an Audience Using Gestures, From a 19th-Century Oratorical Primer.”
* Winston Churchill
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As we declaim like Demosthenes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1717 that the Rev. Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, delivered a sermon to George I of Great Britain on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ.” Starting from John 18:36 (“My kingdom is not of this world”), Hoadly argued, supposedly at the invitation of the king himself, that there is no Biblical justification for any church role in “earthly” government at any level. He identified the church with the kingdom of Heaven—it was therefore not of this world.
The sermon was widely published, and initiated the “Bangorian Controversy”– an argument within the Anglican Church over its appropriate role. Most of the established leadership of the Church– the official religion of Britain– enjoyed its political prerogatives and had no interest in eschewing them. George I, for his part, was interested in weakening the power of the House of Lords, in which those same Anglican Bishops sat and voted. In the event, there was no real immediate change.
Benjamin Hoadly, by his wife, Sarah Hoadly
You stand on the verge of…
It’s May, and readers are no doubt beginning to make notes for the commencement wisdom they’re soon due to dispense. Here, inspiration: from the helpful folks at Online Universities, five graduation addresses (including JFK’s famous 1963 American University speech, pictured above) and 45 other exemplars of the rhetorical arts: “50 Incredible, Historical Speeches You Should Watch Online.”
As we clear our throats, we might recall that it was on this date in 1994 that Queen Elizabeth II of the UK and French President François Mitterrand spoke at the opening of one of “the Seven Wonders of the Modern World,” the Channel Tunnel.
Amaze your friends and colleagues!…
Need to hammer home an arithmetical point? Dramatize a quantitative comparison? NumberQuotes has the juice. One simply types in the number–any number– to be analogized, hits “return”– and up pops a series of striking similes. For example, if one needs to be clear just how over-the-top excessive $250,000 dollars is (in whatever context), one can choose among:
– $250,000 would buy a Caffe Latte Grande for everyone living in Richardson, Texas
– 250,000 Burger King Whoppers would weigh as much as 9.29 African male elephants
– 250,00 is the number of bus and truck mechanics and diesel engine specialists employed in the US
… and so many more options. Compelling comparisons aren’t just for Ronald Reagan any longer– now anyone can pick a number, any number, and click here.
As we spice up our speech, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 (the number of theatrical and performance make-up artists working in the U.S…), on the passing of Empress Zewditu, that Haile Selassie (nee, Tafari Makonnen) was proclaimed Emperor of Ethiopia. While he was, by virtue of his office, the titular head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Salasse is worshipped as God Incarnate by the Rastafarians (who named their faith by conflating “Ras”– “Head,” equivalent to “Duke”– and Salasse’s pre-Imperial first name, “Tafari”).
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